


to my youth

by ratbandaid



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, One Shot, Suicidal Thoughts, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:46:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23338612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ratbandaid/pseuds/ratbandaid
Summary: sylvain reflects on his youth.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier (implied)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 32





	to my youth

**Author's Note:**

> This is a spur-of-the-moment fic based on this song that my friend sent me. ([x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2bbLPYSwvs%22)) The lyrics give off a really strong Sylvain vibe, especially about his childhood, and I just had to write something for this!

Sometimes, Sylvain wakes up in a cold sweat with memories of silhouetted hands reaching out for him, with memories of bruising grips on his spindly forearms and his throat, with memories of burning cuts and aching black eyes and fractured bones. Sometimes, he zones out and thinks about his brother grabbing him by the hair and throwing him against a wall, of Miklan ferociously beating him and trying to abandon him wherever he possibly could, of Miklan cursing his existence and damning him to hell with every living breath—even up until the day, the very moment, that he died to Sylvain’s own hands. Sometimes, he thinks about the sick feeling in his stomach that he gets whenever he’s reminded of Miklan, the boy who was never loved by his family and only craved what Sylvain had been born with, his hate and his jealousy festering in his body and rotting his heart until he became crooked and violent and apoplectic with rage.

Sometimes, he thinks about how he would curl up in his bed, beaten and bruised, and cry silently, his sobs stifled in fear that his father may come barging in to berate him for being such a crybaby or that his brother might come in to laugh at him. He remembers how he would lie in bed with his teary-eyed gaze trained on the window, on the stars outside, and desperately wish that he didn’t exist at all.

If Sylvain didn’t exist, Miklan, though he bore no Crest, would have had the attention and the love that he wanted from his parents—at least more than he did with Sylvain around. He would be the only child in the Gautier household, and even without a Crest, he could be able to find a suitable wife to carry on the Gautier name and maybe even have a child of his own with a Crest. Since no one particularly knows how Crests develop or how they travel down bloodlines, there’s always a chance that his child could have been born with on. Just the way that Miklan had always wanted.

If Sylvain didn’t exist, his parents wouldn’t have to worry about feeding four mouths in the house, just three. They wouldn’t have to worry about a son who flirted his way through everything and brought shame to the family name by winking at a girl he saw on the streets. They wouldn’t have to constantly feel like they have to watch over him, like they’re babysitting a fully grown man.

Sylvain has always dreaded the feeling of people watching him. As a Crest-bearing noble of Faerghus, one with such close relations to the prince, Sylvain’s always had eyes on him. They were people assessing him as a potential candidate for their daughter, as a noble, as a friend, as a son, as a person. He felt like none of his decisions were any good. No matter what he did, he seemed to upset someone. He even upset someone when he was born with a Crest, something that he had no say in. Everything felt like it was just his fault—like everyone hated him for something.

He remembers the look of absolute abhorrence when he hinted to his mother at age six that he didn’t like to play with girls as much as he liked to play with boys. He’d get a literal beating when his father heard—and as Sylvain grew older, he found himself laughing because how could his father _possibly_ harbor such hate for him when he was saying he liked to play with kids the same gender as he, at such a young age? There was nothing but an innocent connotation to the words to him at the time, and all his parents had done was twist his words and misinterpret them drastically. From that point on, Sylvain felt like he couldn’t say anything to his parents without upsetting them so he started to keep his thoughts to himself.

Even when Miklan started hurting him. Even when his own father started hurting him.

And he guesses that this thought process slowly started to spread to others too, not just his parents.

He’d lie to his friends, telling them that he was alright. He would put on a grand smile for them and play off his wounds and his aching heart as something small. But in retrospect, he only thinks it made things worse because he couldn’t stand lying to them—especially one person in particular.

Whenever Felix came over to play and started to fret over Sylvain’s newest collection of wounds—like the necklace of purple and blue that he wore around his neck, the bright red and crescent-shaped marks in his forearms, the white cast wrapped around his pinky finger—Sylvain would just smile at him and give him some excuse. Sylvain could never bring himself to tell Felix or even Glenn about what was happening; but with the way that Glenn’s eyes stopped on Sylvain’s every wounds and the way that he narrowed his eyes at Miklan, Sylvain thinks that Glenn seemed to catch on quite quickly. Sylvain never wanted to be a burden on his favorite friend.

(And if he thought about it, if Sylvain didn’t exist, then wouldn’t he be less of a burden on Felix too? Felix always worried about him and cried whenever he thought that Sylvain was going to get hurt again. If he didn’t exist, Felix wouldn’t have to worry about a stupid friend who apparently got himself into stupid accidents all the time. If he didn’t exist, Felix wouldn’t have to try and figure out whether or not his favorite friend was lying to him. If he didn’t exist, Felix could focus more on training and being happy with Glenn and the others and—)

Yet Felix— _oh, young and naïve, soft-hearted Felix_ —would always believe him, grabbing his hands tightly and scolding him for being clumsy or reckless or dumb.

Sylvain really didn’t know what to do with the love that Felix would show him. He knew it was a platonic love, coming through in how often Felix wanted to come over and play and how often that Felix would practically beg Sylvain to stay safe. He knew that Felix cared. But when he first had this revelation that _oh, someone cares for me_ , he was in utter shock and disbelief. After all, he had never gotten such soft care from anyone other than the servants at House Gautier—and even then, Sylvain knew that it was out of obligation.

How could Sylvain—useless, worthless, pathetic _Sylvain—_ be loved by anyone? It just felt like a lie. In fact, it felt like a cruel joke, and Sylvain was sure that one day, Felix, along with Ingrid and Dimitri, would turn against him, sneer at him and throw things at him or hit him or tell him how awful he is. Sylvain wasn’t sure why at the time, but it terrified him to think that Felix would do that. Sure, he was scared that Ingrid and Dimitri would turn on him, but it scared his little heart the most to think that small and happy Felix would betray him.

So he did the only thing that he could think to do. He hid his thoughts even more and adopted a persona. A flirty, laidback persona who cared about nothing but getting ladies.

If he’s in control of who gets his love and who loves him back, then surely, _surely_ , he can’t get hurt again, right?

As Sylvain grew older, he perfected his persona and even earned himself quite the reputation. He was said to flirt with anything that moves, to go around breaking girls’ hearts for fun, to have a wicked and cruel heart to want to see others so broken—just like Miklan. Those words hurt, and it hurt how Ingrid and Dimitri fell into that depiction of him, always scolding him to get his act together and insisting that he’s better than this, but all it did was reinforce what Sylvain had been thinking. He wasn’t in control of Ingrid and Dimitri liking him—not entirely—and so he got into fights with them and got hurt. The persona grew on him as a result.

And as he kept flirting, he found that he almost couldn’t tell who he was anymore. Was this all he had ever been? Someone obsessed with girls? Someone obsessed with the idea of getting people to fall in love with him? Someone obsessed with having others love him and being able to control how they feel about them? It certainly felt like it. This skirt-chasing Sylvain had once felt like a mask that he wore, one that easily came off when he needed it to, but now it felt like a second layer of skin that wouldn’t come off without causing immense pain.

Sylvain thinks now that one of the things that helped drag him back to who he was had been Felix. While he hadn’t known it then, he had been in love with Felix—had been in love with his looks, his soft and loving heart, his optimistic look on life—since they first met. But when they reunited again at the monastery, after several years of hardly seeing each other, Sylvain felt crushed when Felix treated him with the same cold indifference and disgust that the others had done.

“You’re annoying. Just leave me alone, and go flirt with some girls on your own,” Felix would snarl at him, turning sharply on his heels to head to the training grounds.

It was then that Sylvain realized that maybe his method of trying to protect himself wasn’t entirely right. He felt bad for all the girls he had toyed with, ones who had bore their vulnerable hearts to him only to get betrayed by Sylvain himself. In trying to protect himself, all he had done was hurt others and distance himself from the ones he cared about. Now everyone saw him as a useless, sleazy flirt with a rotten heart.

(But, Sylvain thought, perhaps having a rotten heart was a Gautier trait. Perhaps it was passed down through the genes. After all, his father and his brother were both terrible people with no regard for others, and he was just another heartless Gautier, using others to make himself feel better. Oh, how he _hated_ being a Gautier.)

From then on, Sylvain had wanted to make things right. He wanted to shed this terrible persona, to show everyone that he isn’t who he was pretending to be, to feel worthy of love. He’d work hard at trying to gain the support and respect of his peers. He could be a bright light, emerging from the darkness of the Gautier household. He could be a light that helps others to find their way, to stop people from falling into the pit of despair that he had once dwelled in, to show others that there is hope.

So even though his nightmares of Miklan and his father and abandonment and hate would haunt him throughout the years, Sylvain would persevere. He would show more honesty to his friends, in little ways, whether it was revealing a little bit of his past to the new professor or it was showing remorse for people getting hurt because of him. He would use his Crest for good, even using it to take down his brother.

And though Miklan put him through hell as a child, it still hurt to kill him. They were brothers, and Miklan had only turned out this way because of Sylvain—no, not because of Sylvain, but because of his lack of a Crest. Even now, it feels so surreal to Sylvain, seeing his brother get transformed into some terrible demon—like a manifestation of Miklan’s true self—and having to be the one to strike him down. He still can hear Miklan’s awful screams of agony, can still feel the grimy blood of his brother against his hands, can still smell the rotting flesh and the blood in the air. But Sylvain knew it was for the best.

Even when Fodlan fell into war, Sylvain kept his head held high. He thought about his friends and his classmates, who were able to see past his superficial flirting persona, and he thought about the poor innocent people of Fodlan who were caught up in the war. People were watching him, which he’d always dreaded up until now, but they were also depending on him, and he refused to let them down. He would fight until his dying breath to defend them, even if his dying breath always felt like it was always just right around the corner; but even death couldn’t scare Sylvain, not after what he had been through.

So yes, sometimes, Sylvain does wake up in a cold sweat with nightmares of Miklan and his father and rejection and abandonment and loneliness—but most of the time, he’s able to pick himself right back up and shake away the dread to face another day, thanks to the days of his youth.

(Oh, but it sure does help when he has a beautiful husband, none other than his childhood crush and best friend Felix, right at his side, always happy to calm him down with tired kisses and murmured reassurances.)

**Author's Note:**

> There are a lot of really interesting interpretations of Sylvain's character out there, and I definitely had a lot more that I wanted to add here, but I think that I found a pretty good ending spot and hit a good chunk of what I see in Sylvain. It's pretty disorganized and a little dramatic at times, but it was still fun to write! I hope you enjoyed! c:


End file.
